The federal government's new bill C-61 will bring in amendments to Canada's Copyright Act that are aimed at updating a very old set of legislation in this Internet age.

It's evoked a storm of criticism, some of it warranted. It's to be hoped that parliamentary debate and consideration will result in some minor modifications before it is passed into law.

However, the great majority of the critics are entirely self-serving in their efforts to justify their essentially criminal activities.

Modern technology has enabled ordinary Canadians to hack into, copy and distribute copyright protected materials to a degree never before possible, but just because it's possible it does not make it legal.

A shameless and arrogant sense of "entitlement" has concurrently grown among the Internet generation, to the point that creative artists and industries are in real jeopardy of going under, drowned in a sea of plagiarism and bootleg copies.

That point was driven home rather forcefully for me in April when I paid a tout £60 for a ticket to Björk's Hammersmith Apollo concert. I got there early to ensure I'd be standing close to the front of the 5,000-person crush and was well-pleased that I was close enough to chat to a mate in the press photographers' pit (concert artists often permit accredited journalists to take still photos, albeit never video, of their first two or three songs) while we waited for the Icelandic star to take the stage.

When Björk launched into her first song, I was flabbergasted that dozens of my fellow fans lifted their miniature video cameras above their heads, despite signage in the old art deco theatre which strictly prohibited any camera use.

My next surprise was seeing a burly and surly security guard running along the top of a fence in front of the stage, stopping whenever he spotted the telltale cool-blue hue of a cellphone camera. He would loom over the camera owners, lunging at them and yelling at them to turn it off.

This went on for the entire two-hour duration of the concert, and his swoops were timed so that no one was able to record an entire song without his huge form blocking their cameras for part of it.

I had a prime spot but there wasn't a single song in which this bloke didn't block my view while he berated the camera owners surrounding me — and more often than not, they yelled profanities back at him. My only consolation was that if not for him, there would have been camera-carrying arms raised in front of me all night long.

This effort didn't stop several brazen fans from posting clips of the show on YouTube.com, but if it's any consolation to Björk, none of them were high-resolution — the sound and picture is dismal on each clip.

What these camera-wielding fans did was illegal and those who distributed it via the Internet have compounded their crimes. It is the same as smuggling a camera into an art gallery and surreptitiously snapping a shot of a Monet and then reproducing it for distribution to others. Or staging a production of a Noël Coward play without paying royalties to his estate.

Copyright laws have historically protected creators and owners of original works, and enabled the creators/owners to charge licensing fees for legal copies of these works.

The only thing that has changed is the technology, which enables anyone to reproduce and distribute these works on a scale never foreseen when these laws were first enacted.

And along with that has grown an epidemic of entitlement, the belief that because one has the capability to do easily reproduce another person's work one inherently has the right to do so.

Those who reproduce copyrighted prose, music, movies or video games, whether for their own use or for distribution, whether for profit or not, are committing an indefensible criminal act.

Their protestations of innocence should fall on deaf ears.